Joe Hallett commentary: Book offers peek at importance of Ohio in presidential politics

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Sunday September 8, 2013 7:33 AM

Moments before he was to go on stage to deliver the keynote address on opening night at the 2012
Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie threatened to drop
the F-bomb on national television.

Miffed that a three-minute video introductory of him was going to be axed because the program
was running too long, Christie told convention producers he wouldn’t give the speech if the video
didn’t run. They relented.

Two nights later, as actor Clint Eastwood launched an embarrassing 12-minute conversation with
an empty chair purporting to hold President Barack Obama, Stuart Stevens, GOP presidential nominee
Mitt Romney’s chief strategist, was so aghast that he tossed his cookies.

Such gems are speckled throughout
Collision 2012, the definitive book about the last presidential race by
TheWashington Post’s Dan Balz, America’s premier political journalist.

Over the phone last week, Balz offered more insights about a national race that largely played
out in our own backyard. Ohioans, of course, are used to that.

“There’s something about Ohio; I don’t know whether it’s because it is in the middle of the
country, the crossroads of America, but it just creates an environment where the competition is
very constant, and I assume it will be that way again in 2016,” Balz said.

Ohio gets its own chapter in
Collision 2012, and although Obama beat Romney by 3 percentage points here, Obama’s
campaign fretted early that the state did not set up favorably.

“The basic worry was that Ohio did not have an electorate that was in essence a good electorate
for Obama,” Balz said. “The reason was the Ohio electorate was older, whiter, a little less
educated, and the population was less transient or mobile than in states like Virginia.”

But the Obama campaign got an unexpected gift from Gov. John Kasich and legislative Republicans
who enacted Senate Bill 5, which restricted public-employee bargaining rights, and House Bill 194,
which limited early voting. The November 2011 ballot initiative to successfully repeal Senate Bill
5 gave Obama’s campaign an early “opportunity to organize at the grassroots the core constituency
Obama needed to win,” Balz said.

And House Bill 194, which Republicans eventually repealed, got “people energized, enthused and
angry, so they would have Obama’s back on Election Day.”

Balz cited other key factors in Obama’s Ohio win, which put him over the 270 electoral vote
threshold: the popularity of the auto bailout; the decision to spend $30 million on TV attack-ads
against Romney during the summer months; and the effectiveness of Obama’s ground game, which Balz
described in an anecdote from an Upper Arlington rally.

U.S. Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, a finalist for vice president, is prominently featured, Balz
said, because he “played a more significant role than almost everybody as Romney’s debating
partner, surrogate campaigner and strategist.” Balz said he has “nothing to contradict” the Romney
campaign’s insistence that Portman’s veep prospects were not hurt by his disclosure to the campaign
that he has a gay son — a revelation Portman made public after the election.

In the spring of 2012, minority births outnumbered those of whites for the first time in
American history, and Balz says the GOP is in for long-term trouble if it doesn’t figure out how to
appeal to more minority voters.

“The reality of politics is they could win in 2016, because it’s hard (for Democrats) to win
three in a row and the country may be ready for a change after Obama. It may be that Republicans
could win even without solving some of these challenges they have now. But they can’t indefinitely
continue on with the formula they’ve got now. They have to figure out how to attract more non-white
voters.”